If your product’s value lives in where it comes from — a region, a method, a 450-year tradition — the hardest question in your IP strategy is whether the law will let you fence off the name. A recent Federal Court decision answers it for one famous spirit, and the reasoning matters to any business whose brand is bound to a place. In Republic of Peru (Peruvian State) v Registrar of Trade Marks [2026] FCA 791, Burley J allowed Peru’s appeal and ordered acceptance of PISCO as a certification trade mark for alcoholic beverages — the principal route to protecting a geographical indication in Australia. The Registrar had refused it, reasoning that “pisco” signified a grape brandy from either Peru or Chile, so honest Chilean traders might legitimately want the word. The Court disagreed: on the evidence, the ordinary Australian consumer would understand PISCO as denoting a beverage originating in Peru. The decisive factor was not argument but record — roughly 650,000 bottles of Peruvian pisco imported over 14 years, each labelled as a denomination of origin, which the Court found likely to have “educated ordinary consumers as to the connection between Peru and the word PISCO.” The statutory test under s 177 of the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth) asks whether the mark is “inherently adapted to distinguish” certified goods, or has become so through use — and Peru’s long, disciplined trail of use carried it.

The strategic lesson is broader than spirits, and it cuts against a common assumption that descriptive or geographic names are simply unregistrable. They are hard to register — but a place-of-origin name can become a protectable, premium-commanding asset if you build the evidentiary and regulatory groundwork early. Three things this case rewards: first, documented use over time — the win came from years of consistent labelling and import records, not from the elegance of the legal submissions, the same “build it before the fight” pattern visible in Built Before the Fight: What May’s IP Decisions Reward. Second, a credible rulebook: a certification mark is only as strong as the production and quality rules behind it, and those rules define who may use the name and on what terms. Third, a realistic view of the monopoly’s edge — the whole fight turned on whether other honest traders need the word, the same boundary between private right and public freedom explored in When the Monopoly Ends, Your Shape Has to Stand on Its Own. For founders and in-house counsel whose value is tied to origin — a regional food, a method, a heritage product — the takeaway is to treat the name as IP from day one: standardise how it appears on every unit, keep the sales and promotion records, and codify the rules before a competitor’s generic use hardens the term against you. Origin can be owned — but only by the business that proves it.